The Real Time Social Graph, Transient Social Graphs

Image by Laughing Squid via FlickrWhen you say social graph, you talk of friends, as in people you have known, people who were you friends yesterday, are today, will be tomorrow. That is a long tail. And there are many services that have done a good job of curating those social graphs. Facebook, of course, is the grand daddy of them all.

I use several services to plan what events I wish to go to. And that is another space that could use much better services. I use PlanCast, but PlanCast is not populated enough with events. Users find it too hard to create events, and not enough events get created. And not enough event organizers are using it yet. I also use Charlie O'Donnell's events newsletter.

So it is not easy to find what events to go to. But once you do end up at an event, what is the best way to get to know as many people as possible? How best to learn many names? You could go old school and figure face time is the best way. You say hello. But I end up repeating the same intro line over and over again. You could use business cards, and pen and paper. And those work too. I have had many people key in my email address on their smartphones. I never hear from them.

Getting to know people takes effort. But maybe technology can help. There is room for services that will map real time transient social graphs at events. Hashable is a good one. But then sometimes that can end up the smartphone equivalent of collecting business cards you end up doing nothing with later.

The real time transient social graph apps will be like social augmented reality at events that help you get more out of events. You get to know more people better. And I like the idea of exchanging Twitter handles. Likely the person has linked to their blog from their Twitter page, in case you want to know them better later.